In office environments most people carry their own laptop. But this is a diminishing behaviour. Sales of laptops are decreasing while sales of phones, phablets or tablets are increasing. Laptops are big and cumbersome to carry and the need for local storage is decreasing due to that services are increasingly being stored in the cloud.
In the near future, it is expected that office environments are much more flexible than they are today. People will have their phone (or phablet or tablet), and no laptop and when they need a larger screen they will find one and use it. We will see that people only carry their phone (or phablet or tablet), to a screen and use it. The future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed. Already today at work environments, with the flexible seating of plug and play desks, people find a screen and use it. But employees still need to carry their laptop and plug it in at docking stations or connect all the cables.
The behaviour of using a large screen with your phone will then expand to not only be within the office firewalls and secure intranet. The inventors expect people to use larger screens also in public places, when they have a need of it.
Coming from a quite different use case, and almost from a different time era, the internet café served a similar purpose in the 90's. People were traveling in foreign countries and did not have access to internet or to a portable device to be able to read their emails. At an internet café they could enter their credentials, e.g. a Hotmail address and the password, in a web browser and get access to their services. For reading personal mail, this was appropriately safe, but for enterprise services it lacked the required security. There was always a risk that the PC used in an intranet café recorded the credentials of the user.
The inventors foresee that displays will increasingly be touch screens, since touch screens brings a usability that exceeds the non-touch screens.
In summary, the future holds that people will use smaller devices, such as phone, phablets and tablets, which have a negative impact of usability and productivity. People will want to use larger screens temporarily, when they are available. A problem with using temporary screens is the usability; the first time a person uses a specific screen it may take some time before the user finds what he/she needs. In a public area, on a public screen, there is always the problem with security; how to avoid that credentials are stored on the touch screen.